A horrible supply problem such as shipping thousands of units to retailers where there is no demand rather than to retailers where there is demand would certainly explain the conflicting anecdotes of some posters claiming that units are just collecting dust on the shelves while other posters claim that no one can find them in stock.
I suspect that you don't work in an office with a large number of PCs being repaired or replaced and having the old software reloaded onto the new machines. If you can afford to pay the MS tax and always buy a new machine with a new copy of Windows on it, power to you.
Colvin originally filed in 1998. From the 2003 patent application:
This application is a continuation-in-part of copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/180,616, filed Jun. 26, 2002, which is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/535,321, filed Mar. 27, 2000, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,460,142, which is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/090,620 filed Jun. 4, 1998, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,044,471, the disclosures of which are incorporated by reference in their entirety.
``Sure. It's difficult to differentiate the historic Socrates from Plato's character of Socrates. Hence I said Socrates and Plato.''
Except for the most part it isn't all that difficult to distinguish between the two. On some points, yes, but on most things, it's pretty easy to see where Plato's idealism is being shoehorned into Socrates' mouth. The usual convention is to ``Plato's Socrates'' or ``Plato's charicterization of Soctrates'' when referring to Plato's depiction of Socrates in his later dialogues, or at least to make a statement up front that you're referring to Plato's fictional character rather than the historic Socrates of the earlier dialogues.
``But even in the dialogues in which he just calls everything into question, you can sometimes draw a conclusion of what Socrates is trying to get at. Even if he doesn't come out and say it.''
I wouldn't argue with that, but which of these conclusions are you arguing is self-evident?
``The reason I said that they thought it was self-evident was because when one accepts their notion of justice and virtue (which are both defined in ways that sound very odd to the modern ear), it becomes immediately clear that an intelligent/wise/non-insane person cannot commit evil, or even choose to commit evil, since that would be a contradiction.''
Unless one does not understand hyperbole I've not seen any evidence for such a conclusion in an Socratic dialogue. It there was, it would be an obvious case of the fallacy of the excluded middle. Rather most of the Platonic dialogues are quests to find out what ``true'' or ``pure'' virtue is. Given Plato's idealism, it is necessary for him to develop the true idea of virtue so that he can ``be like'' that idea. In Plato's system no one can ever be truly virtuous, truly wise, truly courageous, etc. Rather, being limited by matter, humans can only approach these ideals. Consequently, arguing that such a glaring contradiction exists in Plato is something of a furphy.
``My original point is that the people that believe tests could catch unethical people were probably subscribing to the classic Greek belief that unethical implies unintelligent or insane, either of which would presumably show up on a test.''
If you modified this to leave out ``classic Greek belief'', then I would mostly agree with you. (Although there are metods of catching dishonesty on tests.) The classic Greek beliefs concerning virtue are far more nuanced than you're giving them credit for being, even if by classic Greek beliefs you mean to say Socratic and Platonic definitions of virtue. The actual belief in question is decidedly modern. The problem isn't so much that it assumes that wicked or insane intelligent people can't fool the test, it's that it assumes that all knowledge is scientific and, consequently, can be quantified and, therefore, be put on some sort of test and objectively measured.
The last article I read about the process in Discover stated that the current cost to buy the animal wasted and turn it to biodiesel was about $100 per barrel. With oil hitting $70 per barrel, we're a good way towards making this technology economically viable.
Self-evident has a very simple meaning. It means that if you understand the concept, you immediately see the truth of it. The premier examples of this are the rules of thought: the principle of identity, the principle of negation, the principle of non-contradiction. That self-evident things are not immediately obvious is hardly a huge controversy.
Second, the Republic is one of the later Socratic dialogues. It is almost universally acknowledged to be putting forth the views of Plato rather than Socrates. This is why much of its content (the infamous allegories of the cave and the ship, for example) stand in contradiction to much of what it thought the be genuine Socratic thought. For a better characterization of Socrates, stick to the early dialogues such as The Phaedo, the Apology or Euthypro.
Compare the assertion ``all of the division heads (and their staff, and their staff) are top-notch'' with the observation ``In contrast, most of the middle management should be tossed.''
It seems to me that a large responsibility of upper level management is to hire, train and retain middle-management. If the high level folks can't make good decisions on promoting rank and file to management or in attracting quality management from outside, how can they be trusted to not run the company into the ground?
Pick up any book on applied ethics, whether on the ethics of medicine or business practices or law or personal relationships, and the vast majority will acknowledge multiple ethical systems. Or you can attend any seminar on ethics for just about any industry and get the same results. If you attend a decent university, regardless of your major you will also have to take at least one course on ethics that discusses various ethical systems.
``Socrates and Plato considered ethical truths to be self-evident, and as self-evident as other truths''
Except Socrates considered to be no truths self-evident except that he did not know any truths. If we assume that the early Platonic dialogues are accurate portrayals of Socrates (which a significant minority of scholars would dispute) then we have a picture of Socrates as a man who did not know what virtue is or if it could be taught and went around critically questioning everyone who claimed that it could be known and taught in order to find out.
You might have a better case for Plato, but Platonic ethics stems from Platonic idealism. That is to say that his ethcis doesn't come from nowhere, but from a philosophical system built on top of other ideas. Plato thought that his first prinicples were self-evident, therefore, his ethical system was not self-evident, but evident. It's truth depends not on the observer being able to see the truth of the matter for itself, but in the observer being able to demonstrate the truth of the ethical system from other principles which can be seen to be true.
But then Aristotle came along and offered a completely different basis for virtue, even if it had many of the same conclusions. And again, Aristotle's ethics was a derivative of his metaphysics. IF you subscribe to Aristotelan metaphysics, THEN you arrive at Aristotle's version of virtue ethics.
The problem here, IMO, doesn't stem from Greek philosophy so much as the human tendency to think ``my way or the highway!'' The field of ethics, even in Greek antiquity, was all about critical self examination. The tendency to assume that there is only one correct ethical system, aside from begging the question, is entirely opposed to critical self examination.
``Most research into ethics is tainted by this ad the notion that there is only one true way of ethics.''
I have to question just how familiar with the field of ethics you are. Most ethicists understand that there are multiple families of ethical theories. A brief introductory class to ethics will most likely introduce one to ethical theories based on individual virtue (think classical theories such as Aristotle), deontology (duty ethics epitomized by Kant), consequences of actions (such various forms of utilitarianism), and teleology (various materialist theories such as Marxism). Most research into the field involved not only trying to explain research in terms of a single theory, but also the facts at hand are explained better by that theory than by alternative theories.
You argued that doubted it is possible to ``teach or even "certify" ethics.'' But how would teaching ethics be any different than any other applied field? For example, you can teach the vast majority of people to understand musical theory, but then it is up to the individual to practice a particular instrument to proficiency. But even then, that proficiency can be measured. Ethics can be taught in the same way by teaching one or more ethical theories and then putting the students into situations that test their application of those theories. For example, Plato thought that young adults should go to drinking parties where they were tempted to drink to excess in order to learn self control. The difference between then and now is that he also argued that anyone who drank so much as to be drunk should be excessively ridiculed to shame them into learning self discipline.
I've already had one visit by the MiB and don't care to see a repeat performance. But I do think it's safe for me to observe that the more people who understand how weaponized Anthrax actually works, the more secure we are against Anthrax attacks in the future. Just like flight 93, once the passengers were aware of what was actually happening, they brought the flight down and most likely saved hundreds if not thousands of lives. If people had not been brainwashed into just sitting back and letting hijackers get away with whatever they wanted, at worst we would have had 4 flight 93's instead of one flight 93, the loss of hundreds of lives at the Pentagon and the loss of thousands of lives at the twin towers.
The difference in results is entirely explicable in terms of knowledge. The people on board flight 93, through cell phone communications, knew had had happened to the other flights. In a world where there are groups that have used Anthrax in the US, I say that if more people understood how it works and how it is made, then it is not only less likely to have such an impact as it did in October of 2001, but also people will be better suited to help investigators because they know how and what must be done to make the Anthrax.
A society can not be vigilant about that of which it is ignorant.
One place I used to work had a system that scaled up to well over 20 Sun boxes each with 10 more CPUs.
It all depends on having the design right. For example, if you have a batch job, you architect the job to follow a master/worker paradigm where a master process doles out chunks of works to worker processes that may or may not be running on the same machine (think SETI@Home). Not every job can be redesigned to to this, but it it's a fairly easy way to do a large number of different tasks. Further, there's no reason that this design couldn't be used by Linux/PostgreSQL or some other Free Software stack rather than Solaris/Oracle.
There are also other paradigms. Perhaps you should do a search on scholarly comp sci papers instead of asking/.. The problem of scaling is not exactly new. Quite a few papers have been written on various way to solve the problem depending on what sort of computational tasks you have to accomplish.
Consider that the premise of TFA is that fun is really just a way to learn things. Then consider imagining that every time you wanted to play Street Fighter, someone playing Super Chun Li and another person playing Super Guile could come in at any time and not only kick your ass, but steal your special moves so you couldn't use them any more AND they could block off access to Bosses like Bison.
How is this not like real life? One guy can learn some impressive martial arts skills. However, that person will always fall to to the one with superior time, technology, or numbers. It is for this reason that police forces are comprised of mostly normal individuals and yet are able to maintain order for the most part. It is also for this reason that warfare has become a matter of who can build the most planes and bombs. Certainly, WWI era fighting aces may have been more skilled, but that ace will always lose to a guided missle.
In fact, all of the key points in TFA seem to be rejections of the world we live in:
Perserverence in the real world is superior to technical skill. Machiavelli wrote an entire book centered around this idea, it is called The Prince and is considered to be the beginning of modern political philosophy. Virtue, for Machivelli, is not a matter of technical skill but entirely of being wise enough to capitalize on good fortune when it occurrs and perservering through bad fortune.
Large groups can easily overpower small groups or individuals. This is the premise of political philosophy since the time of Aristotle. The most modern incarnation is called `social contract' theory. You may have heard of it as it gained some level of popularity through the writings of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes.
Ruling powers often arbitrarily enforce illy defined laws. Even in a liberal republic like the US, one only needs to look at the tax code to see that this is the case. In illiberal nations where the law is the whim of a despot, this truth is even more clear.
My conclusion is that the author of TFA has a problem with the way the world actually is. While I've never played WoW, from the description it sounds to me as if WoW teaches truths far more universal than Street Fighter and it's ilk. The world of Street Fighter is the world of the action movie where The Hero can overcome All Adversity and Live Happily Ever After. Games that teach that sentiment seems to me to be far more dangerous to their players than WoW.
IMO, tools like Dreamweaver are best used by GUI designers to build mock-up which are then sent to development. Having development decide which code to programatically spit out html without a design that's been through an usability assessment is a sure fire way to end up with a fugly and unusable web page.
1. Since when did giving away money become the sole measure of goodness?
2. The available data only suggests which person is best at making certain that other know about the money that they give away, not how much money has actually been given away.
3. The articles even point out that Jobs may have given away considerable amounts without telling anyone. Consequently, the articles are comparing a known value with an unknown value. Such a comparisson ought to result in a NULL value.
4. It does not appear that anyone attempted to contact either Jobs or Gates over the matter.
A few years ago, I had a guy ask me how to do just this. Apparently he was involved with some sort of pyramid marketing scheme and screen scraped a bunch of information off of his upline's website and wanted to know how to present the information on his website in such a fashion that no one could do to him what he had done to someone else.
And then there is the popular figure of the ``little brother.'' Older siblings may very well want to be able to embed DRM in the content that they create with regards to their young siblings. Sometimes for good reasons. Sometimes just to piss them off in a game of one upsmanship.
I'd wager that if you took a random selection of home users and explained to them exactly what DRM entails, that a significant portion could immediately think of at least one use for it. The problem is really more of one where users don't understand what it is than a function of users not having any desire to use it. Just as 90% or more of the features of Microsoft's Office suite goes unused by the majority of users out of ignorance, most home users simply don't know what DRM is.
Now this may be a very good thing. I'm not arguing that DRM is something end users ought to all understand and use. I'm only arguing against the notion that it is something that end users wouldn't want.
Apple shipped 1.2M CPUs in Q4 vs. 7.52M CPUs for HP. But does HP really use AMD for more than 16% of its boxes? After HP, the next largest PC vendor is Dell. Dell certainly isn't presently shipping 1M AMD chips per quarter. (Granted, they may in the future.) AMD may have outsold Intel this past financial quarter, but how many of the folks shipping AMD chips are top ten PC vendors like Apple?
Because my impression that the single biggest factor in the switch was that both IBM and Freescale were screwing Apple with regard to on time delivery in large quantities. For Freescale, the problem appeared to be a lack of production capacity of their factories for G3 and G4 chips. For IBM, it was an apparent unwillingness to make Apple a priority customer as they could make more money making greater quantities of chips for other customers.
Everywhere I've worked seven to ten years ago (1995-1999) made IT workers who wanted Internet access sign special forms that had to be okayed by three levels of management before Internet access was granted. And once granted, it was heavily monitored.
Four to seven years ago (2000-2002) getting Infobahn access was far easier, but most companies still required that you use their proxy so that they could monitor who visited which sites and who spent more time posting to/. that checking code into CVS.
But lately, Internet is usually just taken for granted. At most you have have to worry about firewalls that don't let ports other than the standard http and https ports in or out. And that is fairly easy to bypass by anyone with a home machine.
For example, if I want to run a relatively common application such as Quick Books, the user I run this package as must have admin rights while 9x users need not worry because all users have those rights.
The point being that, while you're correct that the NT kernel has quite a bit of security design, you neglect that Microsoft and its third party vendors have largely nullified the same security by not enforcing good security practices in the applications they release.
Slashdot Mirror
A horrible supply problem such as shipping thousands of units to retailers where there is no demand rather than to retailers where there is demand would certainly explain the conflicting anecdotes of some posters claiming that units are just collecting dust on the shelves while other posters claim that no one can find them in stock.
I suspect that you don't work in an office with a large number of PCs being repaired or replaced and having the old software reloaded onto the new machines. If you can afford to pay the MS tax and always buy a new machine with a new copy of Windows on it, power to you.
``Sure. It's difficult to differentiate the historic Socrates from Plato's character of Socrates. Hence I said Socrates and Plato.''
Except for the most part it isn't all that difficult to distinguish between the two. On some points, yes, but on most things, it's pretty easy to see where Plato's idealism is being shoehorned into Socrates' mouth. The usual convention is to ``Plato's Socrates'' or ``Plato's charicterization of Soctrates'' when referring to Plato's depiction of Socrates in his later dialogues, or at least to make a statement up front that you're referring to Plato's fictional character rather than the historic Socrates of the earlier dialogues.
``But even in the dialogues in which he just calls everything into question, you can sometimes draw a conclusion of what Socrates is trying to get at. Even if he doesn't come out and say it.''
I wouldn't argue with that, but which of these conclusions are you arguing is self-evident?
``The reason I said that they thought it was self-evident was because when one accepts their notion of justice and virtue (which are both defined in ways that sound very odd to the modern ear), it becomes immediately clear that an intelligent/wise/non-insane person cannot commit evil, or even choose to commit evil, since that would be a contradiction.''
Unless one does not understand hyperbole I've not seen any evidence for such a conclusion in an Socratic dialogue. It there was, it would be an obvious case of the fallacy of the excluded middle. Rather most of the Platonic dialogues are quests to find out what ``true'' or ``pure'' virtue is. Given Plato's idealism, it is necessary for him to develop the true idea of virtue so that he can ``be like'' that idea. In Plato's system no one can ever be truly virtuous, truly wise, truly courageous, etc. Rather, being limited by matter, humans can only approach these ideals. Consequently, arguing that such a glaring contradiction exists in Plato is something of a furphy.
``My original point is that the people that believe tests could catch unethical people were probably subscribing to the classic Greek belief that unethical implies unintelligent or insane, either of which would presumably show up on a test.''
If you modified this to leave out ``classic Greek belief'', then I would mostly agree with you. (Although there are metods of catching dishonesty on tests.) The classic Greek beliefs concerning virtue are far more nuanced than you're giving them credit for being, even if by classic Greek beliefs you mean to say Socratic and Platonic definitions of virtue. The actual belief in question is decidedly modern. The problem isn't so much that it assumes that wicked or insane intelligent people can't fool the test, it's that it assumes that all knowledge is scientific and, consequently, can be quantified and, therefore, be put on some sort of test and objectively measured.
It's becoming more and more common to set up biodiesel plants next to meat rendering facilities.
The last article I read about the process in Discover stated that the current cost to buy the animal wasted and turn it to biodiesel was about $100 per barrel. With oil hitting $70 per barrel, we're a good way towards making this technology economically viable.
Second, the Republic is one of the later Socratic dialogues. It is almost universally acknowledged to be putting forth the views of Plato rather than Socrates. This is why much of its content (the infamous allegories of the cave and the ship, for example) stand in contradiction to much of what it thought the be genuine Socratic thought. For a better characterization of Socrates, stick to the early dialogues such as The Phaedo, the Apology or Euthypro.
Compare the assertion ``all of the division heads (and their staff, and their staff) are top-notch'' with the observation ``In contrast, most of the middle management should be tossed.''
It seems to me that a large responsibility of upper level management is to hire, train and retain middle-management. If the high level folks can't make good decisions on promoting rank and file to management or in attracting quality management from outside, how can they be trusted to not run the company into the ground?
Person B: My gamer friend bought this.
Person A: Your gamer friends isn't a true hardcore gamer
I suspect that the ultra-l337 gamers you describe are less than 5% of the gaming market.
Pick up any book on applied ethics, whether on the ethics of medicine or business practices or law or personal relationships, and the vast majority will acknowledge multiple ethical systems. Or you can attend any seminar on ethics for just about any industry and get the same results. If you attend a decent university, regardless of your major you will also have to take at least one course on ethics that discusses various ethical systems.
Except Socrates considered to be no truths self-evident except that he did not know any truths. If we assume that the early Platonic dialogues are accurate portrayals of Socrates (which a significant minority of scholars would dispute) then we have a picture of Socrates as a man who did not know what virtue is or if it could be taught and went around critically questioning everyone who claimed that it could be known and taught in order to find out.
You might have a better case for Plato, but Platonic ethics stems from Platonic idealism. That is to say that his ethcis doesn't come from nowhere, but from a philosophical system built on top of other ideas. Plato thought that his first prinicples were self-evident, therefore, his ethical system was not self-evident, but evident. It's truth depends not on the observer being able to see the truth of the matter for itself, but in the observer being able to demonstrate the truth of the ethical system from other principles which can be seen to be true.
But then Aristotle came along and offered a completely different basis for virtue, even if it had many of the same conclusions. And again, Aristotle's ethics was a derivative of his metaphysics. IF you subscribe to Aristotelan metaphysics, THEN you arrive at Aristotle's version of virtue ethics.
The problem here, IMO, doesn't stem from Greek philosophy so much as the human tendency to think ``my way or the highway!'' The field of ethics, even in Greek antiquity, was all about critical self examination. The tendency to assume that there is only one correct ethical system, aside from begging the question, is entirely opposed to critical self examination.
I have to question just how familiar with the field of ethics you are. Most ethicists understand that there are multiple families of ethical theories. A brief introductory class to ethics will most likely introduce one to ethical theories based on individual virtue (think classical theories such as Aristotle), deontology (duty ethics epitomized by Kant), consequences of actions (such various forms of utilitarianism), and teleology (various materialist theories such as Marxism). Most research into the field involved not only trying to explain research in terms of a single theory, but also the facts at hand are explained better by that theory than by alternative theories.
You argued that doubted it is possible to ``teach or even "certify" ethics.'' But how would teaching ethics be any different than any other applied field? For example, you can teach the vast majority of people to understand musical theory, but then it is up to the individual to practice a particular instrument to proficiency. But even then, that proficiency can be measured. Ethics can be taught in the same way by teaching one or more ethical theories and then putting the students into situations that test their application of those theories. For example, Plato thought that young adults should go to drinking parties where they were tempted to drink to excess in order to learn self control. The difference between then and now is that he also argued that anyone who drank so much as to be drunk should be excessively ridiculed to shame them into learning self discipline.
I've already had one visit by the MiB and don't care to see a repeat performance. But I do think it's safe for me to observe that the more people who understand how weaponized Anthrax actually works, the more secure we are against Anthrax attacks in the future. Just like flight 93, once the passengers were aware of what was actually happening, they brought the flight down and most likely saved hundreds if not thousands of lives. If people had not been brainwashed into just sitting back and letting hijackers get away with whatever they wanted, at worst we would have had 4 flight 93's instead of one flight 93, the loss of hundreds of lives at the Pentagon and the loss of thousands of lives at the twin towers.
The difference in results is entirely explicable in terms of knowledge. The people on board flight 93, through cell phone communications, knew had had happened to the other flights. In a world where there are groups that have used Anthrax in the US, I say that if more people understood how it works and how it is made, then it is not only less likely to have such an impact as it did in October of 2001, but also people will be better suited to help investigators because they know how and what must be done to make the Anthrax.
A society can not be vigilant about that of which it is ignorant.
One place I used to work had a system that scaled up to well over 20 Sun boxes each with 10 more CPUs. It all depends on having the design right. For example, if you have a batch job, you architect the job to follow a master/worker paradigm where a master process doles out chunks of works to worker processes that may or may not be running on the same machine (think SETI@Home). Not every job can be redesigned to to this, but it it's a fairly easy way to do a large number of different tasks. Further, there's no reason that this design couldn't be used by Linux/PostgreSQL or some other Free Software stack rather than Solaris/Oracle. There are also other paradigms. Perhaps you should do a search on scholarly comp sci papers instead of asking /.. The problem of scaling is not exactly new. Quite a few papers have been written on various way to solve the problem depending on what sort of computational tasks you have to accomplish.
How is this not like real life? One guy can learn some impressive martial arts skills. However, that person will always fall to to the one with superior time, technology, or numbers. It is for this reason that police forces are comprised of mostly normal individuals and yet are able to maintain order for the most part. It is also for this reason that warfare has become a matter of who can build the most planes and bombs. Certainly, WWI era fighting aces may have been more skilled, but that ace will always lose to a guided missle.
In fact, all of the key points in TFA seem to be rejections of the world we live in:
My conclusion is that the author of TFA has a problem with the way the world actually is. While I've never played WoW, from the description it sounds to me as if WoW teaches truths far more universal than Street Fighter and it's ilk. The world of Street Fighter is the world of the action movie where The Hero can overcome All Adversity and Live Happily Ever After. Games that teach that sentiment seems to me to be far more dangerous to their players than WoW.
IMO, tools like Dreamweaver are best used by GUI designers to build mock-up which are then sent to development. Having development decide which code to programatically spit out html without a design that's been through an usability assessment is a sure fire way to end up with a fugly and unusable web page.
If you are deleting the resumes unread, then how do you know whether or not they are plain text with .doc extension?
I'm making about 2/3 of what I would be if I had stayed at my cushy job at a large multi-national firm.
And, once I get my evil machinations into place, I'll be making 1/3 of what I am now.
But I'll be sleeping much better at night.
1. Since when did giving away money become the sole measure of goodness?
2. The available data only suggests which person is best at making certain that other know about the money that they give away, not how much money has actually been given away.
3. The articles even point out that Jobs may have given away considerable amounts without telling anyone. Consequently, the articles are comparing a known value with an unknown value. Such a comparisson ought to result in a NULL value.
4. It does not appear that anyone attempted to contact either Jobs or Gates over the matter.
A few years ago, I had a guy ask me how to do just this. Apparently he was involved with some sort of pyramid marketing scheme and screen scraped a bunch of information off of his upline's website and wanted to know how to present the information on his website in such a fashion that no one could do to him what he had done to someone else.
And then there is the popular figure of the ``little brother.'' Older siblings may very well want to be able to embed DRM in the content that they create with regards to their young siblings. Sometimes for good reasons. Sometimes just to piss them off in a game of one upsmanship.
I'd wager that if you took a random selection of home users and explained to them exactly what DRM entails, that a significant portion could immediately think of at least one use for it. The problem is really more of one where users don't understand what it is than a function of users not having any desire to use it. Just as 90% or more of the features of Microsoft's Office suite goes unused by the majority of users out of ignorance, most home users simply don't know what DRM is.
Now this may be a very good thing. I'm not arguing that DRM is something end users ought to all understand and use. I'm only arguing against the notion that it is something that end users wouldn't want.
The approach I would take would be to boot a Linux that hosts a variation of the Linux BIOS and then try to use that to boot WinXP.
Apple shipped 1.2M CPUs in Q4 vs. 7.52M CPUs for HP. But does HP really use AMD for more than 16% of its boxes? After HP, the next largest PC vendor is Dell. Dell certainly isn't presently shipping 1M AMD chips per quarter. (Granted, they may in the future.) AMD may have outsold Intel this past financial quarter, but how many of the folks shipping AMD chips are top ten PC vendors like Apple?
Because my impression that the single biggest factor in the switch was that both IBM and Freescale were screwing Apple with regard to on time delivery in large quantities. For Freescale, the problem appeared to be a lack of production capacity of their factories for G3 and G4 chips. For IBM, it was an apparent unwillingness to make Apple a priority customer as they could make more money making greater quantities of chips for other customers.
Everywhere I've worked seven to ten years ago (1995-1999) made IT workers who wanted Internet access sign special forms that had to be okayed by three levels of management before Internet access was granted. And once granted, it was heavily monitored.
/. that checking code into CVS.
Four to seven years ago (2000-2002) getting Infobahn access was far easier, but most companies still required that you use their proxy so that they could monitor who visited which sites and who spent more time posting to
But lately, Internet is usually just taken for granted. At most you have have to worry about firewalls that don't let ports other than the standard http and https ports in or out. And that is fairly easy to bypass by anyone with a home machine.
For example, if I want to run a relatively common application such as Quick Books, the user I run this package as must have admin rights while 9x users need not worry because all users have those rights.
The point being that, while you're correct that the NT kernel has quite a bit of security design, you neglect that Microsoft and its third party vendors have largely nullified the same security by not enforcing good security practices in the applications they release.